Spokane Valley: Instant City, Two Thousand Three
Near Spokane, Washington
On March thirty-first, two thousand three, Spokane Valley became a city in a single day, and Washington state's ninth-largest city at that. With about eighty thousand residents, it was the third-largest newly incorporated city in American history, after Centennial, Colorado, and Miami Gardens, Florida, which had incorporated just five weeks earlier. The valley communities between Spokane and the Idaho border had been talking about incorporation since the nineteen fifties.
Voters rejected it four times in the nineteen nineties. What finally moved them was the threat that Spokane would annex the western portions of the valley, capturing the big-box retail sales tax revenue the residents preferred to keep local. The yes vote came in May of two thousand two.
A year later, eighty thousand people who had lived in unincorporated county land woke up as citizens of a real city.
